Cheney family sounds off after Iraq protests

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday defended the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, calling it “absolutely the right thing to do.”

“I believed in it then, I look back on it now, it was absolutely the right thing to do,” the Wyoming Republican said with regard to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Cheney made his comments at a POLITICO Playbook lunch conversation with his wife, Lynne, and daughter Liz at Washington’s Mayflower Renaissance Hotel, a lively event that featured jokes, a standing-room-only crowd and a few interruptions — protesters delayed the event twice, screaming at the former vice president for being a “war criminal.”

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“I wondered why the line was so long” for the event, Lynne Cheney joked in response.

The three Cheneys — who rarely appear together — struck a largely defiant tone on many of the major political and policy issues of the day, from national security to electoral politics. On one occasion, Liz Cheney was asked what the Republican Party should do on climate change. “Nothing,” she said, adding that the Obama administration’s climate change policies are a thinly veiled attack on the coal industry. “It is bad policy. It is bad science,” she argued, saying that the growth of bureaucracy and the Environmental Protection Agency is a bigger threat to the U.S. than climate change.

Mike Allen, POLITICO’s chief White House correspondent, began the event by asking Dick Cheney about his decision to lambaste the Obama administration over its foreign policy, particularly in contrast to former President George W. Bush, who has declined to criticize the president since he left office.

Citing a decades-long precedent of former presidents refusing to criticize their successors, Cheney said: “I’m not bound by those strictures."

The former vice president continued to slam Obama, saying that “loves to run around … telling us Al Qaeda’s dead,” despite problems in the Middle East region. Cheney also said that the president inherited a stable situation in Iraq from the Bush administration but that his desire for a full withdrawal has led to the situation today.

“I don’t think Obama ever had any intention of leaving anybody behind,” he added, saying that he thought Obama wasn’t fully committed to a status of forces agreement with Iraq given his desire to get all troops out of Iraq. The president presided over the withdrawal of all troops from the country in 2011.

Cheney also criticized Obama for having “dramatically reduced the military.” He later called budget cuts at the Pentagon “outrageous” and said that the next U.S. president needs to “rebuild the United States military.”

“That ought to be our top priority for spending, not food stamps,” he said, invoking a popular Republican criticism that spending on food stamps has increased under the Obama administration.

Cheney has been harshly critical of the administration’s foreign policy throughout Obama’s presidency, and has chimed in recently over the deteriorating situation in Iraq, where militants from the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant have taken over much of the northern and central parts of the country.

He said in other areas the president had exceeded “his constitutional authority,” particularly in regard to the Affordable Care Act.

“The bill was so bad that I thought it should have been repealed” or, at a minimum, amended, Cheney said.

The former second lady also took aim at a high-level Democratic politician, jabbing at former Secretary of State and first lady Hillary Clinton. When recounting her family’s political history, she said: “We weren’t dead broke, excuse me,” she said, poking fun at Hillary Clinton’s comments that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House at the end of his two terms as president.